This linkspam does not mention the election, since I collected the links in the previous week.
How Should We Respond to Passive Communication? – Miri discusses the conflict between “ask” and “guess” culture, and more specifically how she responds when people around her use “guess” culture. I was also raised with ask culture. But I’d say for me the more serious cultural conflict is between positivity and negativity. Many people have trouble understanding that I don’t like compliments. I’d rather people be critical of me, and let me be critical of them.
Valeant sued for botching marketing of female libido pill – Some of you may heard of Addyi (aka Flibanserin), which is used to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder in pre-menopausal women. After getting approved by the FDA last year, it seems to have been a market failure. Possibly because it’s barely effective and has serious negative side effects. And now the investors are suing the owning company for poor marketing. Via Next Step: Cake.
Entropy and Complexity, Cause and Effect, Life and Time – Sean Carroll teams up with Minute Physics to explain stuff. I particularly like the one on cause and effect, embedded below the cut. One of my pet peeves is when people cite physics as supporting their intuition that causation is real. Causation isn’t really a physics concept, it’s a philosophy concept.
More Trans – Zinnia Jones has a series of articles considering trans issues, applying ideas from Less Wrong. I find this interesting, although LW philosophy is always in an uncanny valley for me. I agree with it too much except on some subtle points that are not really worth explaining.
Non-urban lived experience, not theory – The author talks about her queer rural experience, and warns against painting it as one single thing. She is critical of the “urban gay mecca” idea, the idea that queer people should just move to cities to be safer and happier.
I’ve lived in cities all my life, so the idea that it’s best to move to a city never occurred to me? I mean, the rural/urban comparison just doesn’t come up. I think the main thing about cities is that they have nice economies of scale. Like public transit. I can’t drive.
I’ve been adoring Jones’ More Trans series. Data! Numbers! squeee
The link for Entropy and Complexity, Cause and Effect, Life and Time doesn’t seem to be about any of those things 😉
Carroll’s right about causation as an emergent property, but this isn’t quite right;
CP violations in the Standard Model imply time reversal violation if CPT symmetry holds. This is probably rather important for matter-antimatter asymmetry.
@Rob,
Thanks for the correction.
I think it’s still basically correct to say physics doesn’t care about the direction of time as long as we have at least one of T, PT, CT, or CPT symmetry.
If the bs surrounding Addyi interested you check out TL;DR (Teal Deer) on youtube he did five videos about it
@sandi seattle,
I only listened to the TL;DR videos briefly, but found myself bothered by a few inaccuracies (which may have been corrected in the subsequent hours of video, but I didn’t bother to find out). I would not recommend these videos.
For background on Addyi, I recommend this JAMA article.